organized and chaperoned weeklong trip to Washington, DC, for more than 50 orchestra students

7. designed

designed senior service learning project chosen as elective by hundreds of students

8. founded

founded school-wide mindfulness meditation group attended by students, faculty and staff

9. adapted

adapted elementary math curriculum to students with varied skill levels

10. led

led students to strong performance on AP Spanish exam: 90% scored 4/5 or higher

I hope using these action verbs helps you feel proud of your accomplishments and more confident about finding Life After Teaching.

In fact, recent studies have shown that writing and editing stories about yourself can inspire you to stay positive and take transformative action. So think of your new resume and cover letters as opportunities to rewrite your story — and think about your next chapter.

Have you heard students talking about the latest updates to their Instagram accounts?

Do you enjoy posting photos to your own Instagram, or follow friends who do?

Whether you love it, hate it, or have never heard of it, you can take a cue from the photography app as you craft your post-teaching resume.

Let me explain:

On Instagram, you crop, add a filter and shift focus before sharing your picture with the world. You can take the same three steps to edit your post-teaching resume.

1. Crop: Cut the parts of your old resume that don’t serve the big picture.

Get rid of details that are no longer relevant to the jobs you want. This involves shortening bullet points, scrapping whole lines and even entire sections of your teaching resume that don’t translate to your target career.

“Crop” your teaching resume to focus on your new goals.

What will hiring managers care about? What won’t matter to them?

Let these questions guide your “delete” button.

For instance, I cut the education and literature courses I had listed as “Relevant Coursework” under the “Education” section of my teaching resume. Except for the time I applied to an academic textbook publisher, I knew the fact that I’d taken “Methods of Teaching Secondary English” and “Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances” would no longer interest employers.

I also pared down the descriptions of my two teaching jobs from 8-10 lines each, to 5-7 lines each. This doesn’t mean your descriptions have to be 5-7 lines long, especially if you’ve only had one teaching job. But you should think about how to make your explanation concise and clear to someone who’s never worked in education.

2. Add a filter: help employers see your experience in the right light.

As I’ve said before, teaching has prepared you well for success outside the classroom. But employers need guidance to understand and appreciate the value that you bring.

This step is like choosing the Instagram filter that best suits the image you want to project.

And rather than saying you differentiated instruction, show how you adapted your work for different audiences, or met the needs of various stakeholders.

3. Shift focus: sharpen the details that matter and bring them to the front.

One of the coolest features on Instagram is the tilt/shift button. Basically, it makes parts of your picture blurry while bringing others into focus. I like how it can make an unremarkable photo I’ve taken look compelling and even mysterious.

Not a very artistic example of tilt shift, but those sprinkles do look pretty crunchy.

So if you’re involved in any projects or volunteer work (including school activities) that demonstrate your interest in your target career, make sure to highlight them. For me, that meant listing my experience as a freelance writer first — before either of my teaching jobs.

And if a job description asks for experience with “juggling multiple projects on tight deadlines,” prove how you’ve done it:

Here, specific timeframes (daily, weekly, monthly) help create a vivid picture of the projects you handled simultaneously. As I said in my post on transferable skills from teaching, quantifying your accomplishments is an effective way to apply “show, don’t tell” to your resume.

When it’s done, your edited resume should convince employers that you look exactly like who they want. It should also make you think, “Hey! I look pretty good in that!” — even if you could only see yourself as a teacher before.

If you’ve landed a job after teaching, how did you you crop, filter or shift your teaching resume?

All I’ve ever known is teaching, and I’m not sure if I can do anything else.

In my last post, I wrote about how common this self-doubt is among those who’ve taught.

It shouldn’t be this way. If you’re like most teachers, you’ve got plenty of credentials: hours of professional development credits, a master’s degree (or one that’s in progress), plus a certification or two. And you’ve got a host of specialized skills, like knowing how to keep 25 kids from jumping out the window on an early dismissal day.

Say it with me:

Those who teach can do.

That’s right: if you can teach, you can succeed outside teaching.

In fact, teaching requires many of the same skills every business needs.

Just ask Chris Cooper. He started his own copywriting service after eight years of teaching high school English. As he built his business, Chris realized he wasn’t starting from scratch. Years in the classroom had already taught him how to market himself, land clients, and deliver high-quality work.

Chris Cooper, entrepreneur and former English teacher

Here are just a few of the business skills teachers have, according to Chris:

Strong focus on objectives

Every good teaching lesson has an objective, a focus that drives every activity and discussion. It’s like a road map for the day. As a teacher, I had a love/hate relationship with objectives. Sometimes I wanted to embrace the tangents that come with learning. In a business setting though, there’s little room for tangents when time is money, so personal and client objectives drive everything I do.

The first question I ask every time I sit down with a client is about their objective. How can you do a good job for them if you don’t know what they want? What are they trying to do and whom are they trying to reach?

Whether you’re starting your own business or working for someone else, you can use objectives in the same way you used them in a classroom — to drive activities and discussions.

Objectives are nothing more than goals. What needs to be accomplished? How will you get there and how will you know you succeeded? You might be setting a financial objective, a project objective, or a new career objective. No matter what your next path is, you’ll need to know where you’re going today, next year, and five years from now.

Make your objectives clear and measurable with deadlines and you’re on the right track.

Ability to make every minute count

High school kids don’t like to have their time wasted. They’ll tolerate it because that’s about all they can do, but they want something they can use, something valuable to them. Once I noticed them watching the clock, I knew the value of my lesson was gone.

Customers and clients are no different. But unlike those kids in those seats, they do have a choice. And they’ll walk if you don’t immediately show them the value you can provide.

The worst thing we can do as business owners or employees is let money walk out the door. Value comes from solving other people’s problems. It’s a combination of identifying needs, providing solutions, and giving a little more than is expected. You can sell shoes in department store or sell copywriting services like me, but the bottom line is that you should always give people more than they expect.

Sales, marketing, blogging, copywriting, high school English. Doesn’t matter. Your audience is asking for the same thing. Value.

Ability to scaffold and simplify complicated ideas

I’m often called upon as a copywriter because people can’t get out of their bubble. They throw around acronyms. They speak industry jargon and lingo. It sounds like a foreign language to everyone else. And it turns people off. You can’t engage people if they feel like outsiders.

Teachers call it scaffolding — breaking complex ideas into easily digestible steps that build upon one another (you know, like a scaffold).

If you’re selling something, it’s called a sales funnel. You start with a group of people who may be interested in your product or service and you take a series of actions to move them down the funnel toward buying. In marketing, you might start people off with a welcoming email, then set an autoresponder to update them about new products or sales every few days or weeks.

Simple or easy isn’t to be mistaken for dumb. I’m not talking about dumbing anything down. I’m talking about making whatever you’re selling relatable to everyone.

In business, just like scaffolding a complex lesson, you want to constantly move people forward by making the big picture digestible. One. Bite. At. A. Time.

Marie Ardito spent 31 years in the classroom, where she taught first through eighth grade, spending most of her career as a reading specialist.

When it came time for her to retire, though, it didn’t quite happen.

After two months off, Marie began a new career helping others like her. She’s now an information coordinator for MA Retirees United (MRU), a nonprofit group that educates public sector workers about their retirement rights and benefits. Before that, she was the executive director of another retirement group.

When I read about Marie in a recent New York Times article about “second-act” careers for retired workers, I knew I had to reach out to her. In the article, she says,

“One of the things that drives me crazy is the comment, ‘I can’t do anything but teach.’ I say, ‘If you can relate to kids, normally you can relate to anyone.’ The skills are transferable.”

Marie was kind enough to speak with me about her career path and share her take on what teachers have to offer in the workplace. Here are some highlights from our phone conversation.

What made you interested in helping retirees?

Basically I loved teaching. When I was thinking long-range, I knew I had to put some teaching into my retirement. My first thought had been to develop a seminar I would do for seniors, and then a neighbor of mine told me to catch them before retirement. And so I looked at what I had done, saw that I could adapt it, and developed a “Preparing for Retirement” seminar that I started doing years before retirement.

I’m not saying that all of my retirement is teaching — it isn’t. Ever since I was a kid of 16, I’ve had an interest in older people. I had worked in a nursing home, and thought that that was an age group that I someday wanted to reach out to.

I feel that my experience as a teacher enables me to do an excellent job with presenting issues, whether it’s preparing for retirement, living in retirement as an informed retiree, or understanding social security and Medicare, which are all seminars that I do. It enables me to present it in an understandable way, and I feel I’ve gone beyond teaching to a new way of life.

How did you get your current job?

I had been approached by Kathy Kelly (who was, at the time, the president of the American Federation of Teachers in Massachussetts) to help form a retirement group. So we talked, and MRU was born. We started with a couple of hundred members, and now we have close to 2,500.

So your work after teaching came about because you were approached by people based on work you were already doing.

Yes, and I think this happens a lot to people. What I find over the years, dealing with several members, is that when they’re asked to do something that’s outside the teaching profession, sometimes they’re reluctant. I’ve had them call me and say, “Well, what do I know about that particular thing?”

I know for myself, when I initially took the first job, I was thinking, “I’ve got to speak at board of directors meetings; I’ve got to speak at chapter meetings.” So I think that there’s always a little bit of fear of the unknown and questioning whether you’re really up to the task, but I think what those who have either retired from the teaching profession or are thinking of moving on to something else very often don’t realize, is that the skills that we’ve developed as teachers are so marketable and transferable.

I feel really strongly about this too, based on my own experience with changing careers. So what helped you gain confidence? How can we convince more teachers to be proud of the skills they’ve acquired and help them communicate all that they have to offer to employers?

I think sometimes we forget what we’ve taught. I can remember repeatedly saying to students no matter what age level, grade or subject I was teaching, “There are no stupid questions in my classroom.” And I think that we as educators who have said something similar to that — “Don’t be afraid to ask a question,” or “Don’t be afraid to try something” — I think we don’t hear ourselves when it comes to our own personal life. We look for the safe and the sound and the tried and the true and then realize that maybe putting your feet in the cold water could turn out to be a great adventure.

That’s something I’m still learning, too. In my new career as a writer, I’ve realized all those things that I said to my kids about good writing — they still apply, and I’m still learning them.

Yeah — I can remember, back when I first started teaching, putting bulletin boards up with sayings, and I can remember the saying, “It’s better to try and fail than fail to try.” I think that that’s something we have to learn — that yeah, you might fall on your face, but you can fall eight times or 80 times, but just get up and just keep moving.

And I don’t feel this is limited to teachers. I think people don’t think about what they might like to do — whether it’s retirement or changing careers — and the fact that they can do something else.

As part of one of my 12 hour-long seminars, I used to hold up a peanut. You know, the kind you eat at the ballpark — the double peanut? I’d say to them [the retirees], “I used to be fascinated when I was a kid learning about George Washington Carver.” And I said, “He took this stupid little peanut and came up with 300 different uses for it! Somehow or another, I kinda think big ol’ us must have more than one use — more than one thing that we can do.”

You mentioned your presentation skills earlier. What other skills from teaching have helped you be successful at your job?

I’m involved a lot with legislative issues, and I think the research skills I developed both as a student and as a teacher have been absolutely invaluable. I also worked in different systems, different buildings, so I think that another one of the skills that I’ve found invaluable is to adjust to change. I think every teacher has a little of that, because every year you get a new group of kids.

So what other skills do you think teachers have that set them apart?

It depends on the field they want to change to. I bumped into a woman who worked at an inpatient hospital. She was a retired teacher, and her people skills, her computer skills and her organizational skills helped her. She revamped the whole admissions process for them, and she just got a promotion to some other department.

As someone who successfully transitioned into a new career after retirement, what advice do you have for older teachers who want to begin a new career?

I think you have to have confidence in yourself. You’ve got nothing to get discouraged about, because there is one job out there for you. If you don’t let somebody deflate your balloon, and you believe in you, age is just a number! Especially as teachers, I think we become so engrossed in kids that we forget ourselves. Everybody, no matter what their profession is, has to think, “I can do it!” Like I used to tell the kids at school, “Do the impossible.”

Age is a number, and if you’re bogged down by a number, shame on you! And if someone asks me, “How old are you?”, I have to do the math, because I don’t stop to think how old I am.

You’ve got to have curiosity and always want to know more. Try something new. I don’t care if you’re 65; you can still get a job. If I believe I’ve got something to give, if I can sell myself, they’re going to grab me at 65. It’s attitude.

Teachers are some of the most hardworking, patient and reliable workers out there. I know this and other people who’ve taught know this, but if you’re a teacher looking to start over, how can you persuade employers outside education?

Hiring managers often screen out candidates with backgrounds that don’t match the job description exactly, and it’s safest to choose someone with direct experience rather than take a chance on a career changer.

Another hurdle is the “lazy teacher”/”teaching is easy” stereotype, and we’ve all heard the “must be nice to get summers off” line more times than we care to count.

So when people see “teacher” on your resume, they may think all you do is show movies while reading the newspaper in the back of the classroom; or stand at a lectern and drone like Ben Stein; or sing songs about bunnies to an adoring crowd of small children.

You must show them they’re wrong about you.

To do this, you need to take an inventory of your transferable skills from teaching. This will help you craft stronger resumes and cover letters and prepare for job interviews with better focus. The list below is a basic one; I hope it’ll help you create a complete list of all the valuable skills you have to offer.

1. strong written and oral communication skills

Seems obvious, right? But you still need to explain how the lessons you delivered each day are good examples of your ability to make complex material engaging, understandable and persuasive to a general audience.

You should also list examples of the many types of writing you’ve tailored to different audiences: e-mails to parents, administration and support staff; individualized feedback to students; lesson plans and class materials revised for different skill levels; and so on.

Include any presentations you’ve made at professional development conferences, faculty meetings and board of education meetings as well.

Side note: As ingrained as it may be, please resist the urge to use education jargon such as “differentiated instruction,” “backwards design” and “multiple intelligences” in your resume; these terms will mean nothing to the resume reader. Plus, you’re no longer looking for a teaching job!

2. strong interpersonal skills

Again, even though it’s a no-brainer for those of us who’ve taught, you’ll need to show how experienced you are at working with all kinds of people in a complex organization.

Great examples of this: co-teaching; team-teaching; working with in-class support teachers, paraprofessionals and guidance counselors; and collaborating with teachers in your department and in other departments. Any projects that came out of this work will help strengthen your case.

You should also demonstrate how you’ve handled difficult people and situations with professionalism, tact and integrity. Go into interviews prepared with at least two anecdotes to illustrate how you defused a potentially chaotic classroom environment or changed a relationship with a student or parent for the better. You could also emphasize your experience with working in varied environments, such as middle school and high school; suburban and urban districts; teaching special education and Advanced Placement classes; or all of the above.

3. demonstrated ability to work independently

Whether it’s designing a course, a unit or even a 40-minute class, effective classroom planning demands time and discipline. So does giving students feedback, especially when you have more than 100 students, as middle school and high school teachers often do. Some teachers are so industrious, they get all their planning and grading done at school. Other teachers devote nights and weekends to schoolwork after putting in at least eight hours during the day. In most cases, there’s no one who can do the work for you, or even share responsibility for it.

So how do you demonstrate this accountability to employers? My advice is to quantify what you’ve done wherever possible — from your student load, class size, course load and even how much grading you do. On my resume, I wrote that I graded about 1,000 essays a year. Take that, lazy teacher stereotype!

Unfortunately, the lazy teacher stereotype is hard to shake. One persistent belief is that teachers use the same tired lessons every year, or just make students do worksheets from a textbook.

The many good teachers I know always try to do better. They change lessons that didn’t work, revise their curriculum or seek professional development opportunities in the summer, and even adjust their plans in real-time as they “read” what’s going on in the classroom.

In interviews, be prepared to explain how you solved problems, faced new challenges and handled unexpected circumstances. Use your best learning experiences from teaching to demonstrate how well you can handle all the responsibilities of the position you want, and adapt smoothly to a new career and work environment.

5.demonstrated ability to work under pressure/in a fast paced, deadline-driven environment

Again, it’s helpful to quantify here to demonstrate the many competing tasks you were able to deliver on deadline.

How many different lessons did you prepare each day?

How often did you submit lesson plans?

How often did you submit progress reports and grades?

What other forms of feedback did you provide and how often?

Once you’ve gathered this information, and gotten lots of practice with sharing it, you’ll start to understand — and project — how well teaching has prepared you for your next job.